The campaign for sanctions against South Africa by the global anti-apartheid movement has become a paradigmatic case of the use of economic sanctions. This presentation analyses the sudden embrace of sanctions in 1960 by leading organisations within the global anti-apartheid movement. Whereas sanctions have often been treated by scholars as a natural and obvious response to apartheid – and a response that does not, therefore, require explanation – Stevens shows that before 1960 few of the leading opponents of apartheid encouraged the use of sanctions, and that many had reasons to oppose their use. These assessments changed in the particular set of domestic South African and international circumstances that prevailed in the months following the Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa on March 21, 1960. This specific context in which the turn to sanctions occurred would prove to be short-lived. But the embrace of sanctions in 1960 would continue to shape the actions of the anti-apartheid movement – and of other transnational activist movements that modeled themselves upon it – over subsequent decades.

Jed Odermatt: The EU’s Contribution to the Development of International Law

The EU Treaties set out that the European Union ‘shall contribute […] to the strict observance and the development of international law.’ While there is a great deal of discussion about how and whether the EU ‘observes’ international law, there is less emphasis on what it means for the EU to ‘contribute’ to the development of international law. This question is often answered by looking at the EU as an ‘international legal experiment,’ examining how the EU used international legal foundations to develop into a constitutional legal order. Yet the EU also contributes to the development of international law when it participates in its own right on the international scene. As the EU seeks to become a more important a global actor in a number of fields, from trade and development to international peace and security, it also contributes to the development of international law. This seminar will give an overview of the different ways in which the EU’s action on the international scene is giving rise to questions for public international law in fields such as the law of treaties, international responsibility and the use of sanctions.